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July 19, 2008

EPA Bids for Totalitarian Powers

Posted by Dave Blount at July 19, 2008 11:52 AM

When the Goracle bellows to a receptive establishment that we must end the "carbon age" within 10 years or be doomed, does it mean that liberals are so insane as to believe we can run our economy without fossil fuels within a decade? Not at all: what it means, if the left has its way, is a form of totalitarianism more restrictive than anything Stalin could have imagined. From today's Wall Street Journal:

In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they'd like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA's nanomanagement.

The beginning of the end for freedom in America might have been the Supreme Court's preposterous declaration that CO2 — which we exhale when we breathe, which has no proven ill effects, and which plants require to survive — can be regulated by federal environazis as a "pollutant" — along with other "greenhouse gases," presumably including the #1 greenhouse gas, water vapor.

The EPA has responded with a 588-page "advance notice of proposed rulemaking" that promises federal regulation of pretty much everything, from cow farts to lawnmowers. Even the hulls of boats will have to be manufactured in accordance with the imperious dictates of EPA enviroweenies.

The simple strategy is to set limits on emissions of absolutely harmless "greenhouse gases" so low that everyone is in violation, and therefore has to come to the government with hat in hand, pleading for special permission to exist. As the EPA puts it:

We expect that the entire country would be in nonattainment.

The EPA has also taken upon itself the duty of levying taxes, also known as "fees" on the carbon emissions that all human activities produce. It is in effect bidding to become another branch of government, more powerful than the others combined and with no accountability to voters whatsoever. The other branches will be more than happy to take cover behind the environment bureaucracy's unaccountability, exactly as the executive and legislative branches have so often hidden behind the skirts of the Supremes on issues that involve running roughshod over the interests of voters.